Fair Use is Your Friend: A new video on making video

Transformativeness is a challenging concept to teach. I’ve been working on it ever since the The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education was published back in November.

Remix Culture: Fair Use is Your Friend, a video recently released by the Code of Fair Use Project at Stanford University, addresses fair use as it applies to producing online video.

With my students producing media at a rate I could never have predicted, with their best creative work–as well as their more casual dialogue and their personal stories and performances–playing regularly on YouTube, I plan to share this video widely.

The film is meant to accompany the June 2008 Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for Online Video, one of a few new such codes of practice (like The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education and the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practice in Fair Use) and it’s likely to make it a bit easier to discuss responsible mixing and mashing of commercial media with learners.

The film celebrates the blossoming of amateur culture and reminds us that copyright was designed as a balance, providing reasonable protection for copyright owners while assuring creators the ability to make new work using old culture. It advocates for safeguarding against censorship by private copyright. Fair use is a right–we must exercise it; we must use it or lose it.

Over the years, we (librarians especially) have functioned as gatekeepers. But fair use is not about following restrictive and prescriptive rules that include such details as arbitrary time limits, codes that ignore the new platforms we have for dialogue.

According to Patricia Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University,

We are at the very, very beginning, a very sloppy messy beginning, to a new way of making culture and making media.

The Center for Social Media site explains that the need or desire to remix is part of a longstanding tradition:

Mashups, remixes, subs, and online parodies are new and refreshing online phenomena, but they partake of an ancient tradition: the recycling of old culture to make new. In spite of our romantic cliches about the anguished lone creator, the entire history of cultural production from Aeschylus through Shakespeare to Clueless has shown that all creators stand, as Isaac Newton (and so many others) put it, “on the shoulders of giants."

To more ethically stand on those shoulders, to make media and create culture responsibly, students and teachers need to see that fair use is really about reasoning and logic. (This reasoning process is outlined on the Unlocking Copyright Confusion wiki.)

The website reminds us of two tests for transformative use:

• Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?
• Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

But the video, Fair Use is Your Friend, goes a step further than these tests, offering a few clear but brief examples of fair use under specific categories to help students determine transformativeness:

• Illustration or example
• Incidental use
• Cultural rescue
• Launching discussion
• Mashups

While that seven-minute video is a great introduction, I suspect many of us need more. All along, my big problem seemed to be finding clear models to inspire classroom discussion. What do these categories really look like in practice?

I recently discovered that the Center for Social Media also offers a list of categorized top five video examples, many of which might be appropriate for use in the high school classroom. (Preview these before using!)

Satire and Parody

• Baby Got Book
• Bush vs. The Zombies
• George Bush Don’t Like Black People
• The Soprano Wars
• Victory in Iraq

Negative or Critical Commentary

• Metallica Sucks
• Grandpa Fred: Do you really have this kind of time to waste?
• Fox News Edits a Democrat to Make Him Look Worse
• Clint Eastwood’s The Office
• Coffee with Chou: First Paris Hilton Interview After Jail!

Positive Commentary

• Internet People
• 7 Minute Sopranos
• Steve Irwin Fan Tribute
• Ain’t No Other Man
• Not So Innocent: A New Approach to Animaniacs

Quoting in Order to Start a Discussion

• Abstinence PSA on Feministing
• She Wants It on Feministing
• Daily Kos Open Thread: Ron Paul
• Swing State Project: Worst Political Ads
• Worst Music Video Ever

Illustration or Example

• Evolution of Dance
• What the Buck? To Oprah with Love
• Internet People
• The 10 Most Ridiculous Things About the Beyonce Experience
• Britney Spears is Bald Song

Incidental Use

• Prisoners Dance to Thriller
• Let’s Go Crazy
• Fat Cat watching TV SITTING on the couch
• My Birthday Party/Moonbounce Documentary
• Loud Neighbors

Personal Reportage/Diaries

• Me Onstage with U2…AGAIN!!!
• Arcade Fire – Wake Up pt. 2 – Porchester – 01/02/07
• I Was on American Idol
• Me on Letterman!
• Me and Madonna

Archiving of Vulnerable or Revealing Materials

• The Power of Nightmares
• Stephen Colbert’s speech at the Whitehouse Correspondence Dinner
• Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People
• Bush Gives the Finger
• The Trap

Pastiche or Collage

• Dax Flame’s Hollow’s Eve
• Me Singing “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield
• Daft Hands
• Apple Commercial
• Crazy Indian Video… Buffalaxed!

Don’t miss the wealth of other resources for teaching fair use gathered by the Center for Social Media.

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